by Louise Voss
‘You’re still gorgeous,’ she said, smiling at his spikily fringed dark green eyes.
‘You’re not so bad yourself, doll-face.’ He winked at her and they clinked glasses, but Helen couldn’t help wishing that he would occasionally return a compliment with something a little more romantic than a silly accent.
Her phone buzzed, and she immediately picked it up from the table, where she’d kept it throughout the meal. But it was only an electronic notification of someone’s move in Words With Friends, and she sighed with relief. For once, she had actually remembered to charge her phone before going out, something she was hopeless at. Sean was always nagging her about it.
‘Perhaps I should call to see how it’s going,’ she said, phone still in hand. Sean reached across the table and gently took it from her. ‘Relax, Hel. If there was a problem Alice would’ve called. You know she would. She might be a lazy madam but you know she adores Frankie. Besides, there’s no way she’d deal with a pile of vomit or too much screaming on her own if she knew we were only ten minutes away, so we can be certain that nothing’s amiss. Why are you so jumpy all of a sudden? You haven’t been this paranoid since she was a baby!’
Helen felt annoyed with him again. ‘You know why. Liam McConnell and Izzy Hartley, that’s why.’
Liam and Izzy were the names of the two stolen children. Helen’s friend Elena took her child to the same nursery Liam had been enrolled at, and knew his mother. The poor woman was a total wreck apparently, dragging herself around hollow-eyed with Prozac, on permanent tenterhooks for the smallest morsel of news of her son, news that so far – almost a week in – hadn’t materialized. Both children had vanished seemingly into thin air, within two days of one another.
Sean bristled slightly at the implied criticism, as he always did when it came to his daughter. ‘Alice would never let that happen.’
Helen poured them both another glass of wine, to try and dispel the image of little dark-haired chubby bespectacled Liam – his photo was all over the papers – being unstrapped from his car seat and removed. CCTV in the supermarket car park showed a single glimpse of a muffled-up person carrying him away, but there was no trace of where and no indication whatsoever of who it was. Liam’s mum had only nipped back into the supermarket to retrieve some dry cleaning she’d forgotten. She was gone barely two minutes.
Sean gave Helen one of those long, impenetrable gazes where he could be thinking anything from ‘This is the woman I really, really love’, to ‘Wow, you make my life a living hell.’ She didn’t really think it was the latter, but by the same token, she did find him unreadable sometimes. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel loved by him – perhaps just not loved as much as she’d have liked. Not loved as much as he’d loved Alice’s mother, all those years ago. Helen had given up fishing for information on that score. She had long realized that the shutters clanged down the moment she even mentioned the woman’s name. The dreaded dead perfect first wife – pretty much impossible to live up to that ideal, so Helen had stopped trying, and Sean never spoke of her.
‘I just can’t stop thinking about those children – both younger than Frankie. Hardly more than babies … Let’s change the subject – what shall we talk about?’
Sean smiled properly at her. His smile could still make her heart quicken. He took her hand across the table, sliding her phone into his pocket so she couldn’t keep checking it. ‘There was something I wanted to run by you, actually,’ he said, and she was puzzled at the slightly shy tone of his voice.
‘You’re not going to beg me to let you buy a new car are you?’
‘No …’ He took a deep breath and gazed into her eyes. ‘Hel, I know I was joking about the nightmare of having two screaming babies, but Frankie’s almost four now and—’
She felt a sudden sharp pain of love and excitement in her belly.
‘—do you think it’s time we had another one? It would be so nice for Frankie to have a little brother or sister. Alice would love it too.’
Helen’s smile broadened into a beam, and she squeezed his hand tightly to stop tears of joy spilling down her cheeks. He’d been anti the idea of a second child for so long that she’d given up hinting.
‘Really? You’re ready?’ Every atom of her danced when he nodded slowly back.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Actually I think I am.’
They were a lot later getting home than Helen had originally told Alice they would be. She’d insisted that they celebrate with two glasses of champagne, and after they paid the bill and left, they decided to walk the long way home. They went through the locked park, climbing over the gate to get in like two giggly teenagers, enjoying the crisp summer air. They kept stopping to kiss, the way they used to when they were first together and couldn’t keep their hands off one another.
By the time Sean turned the key into the lock of the front door, it was 11.25 P.M. All the lights were still on downstairs, and Helen sobered up enough to tut when she heard the sound of the TV coming from the living room. Alice should have gone to bed an hour ago.
She dumped her handbag on the bottom stair. ‘Ali? We’re back. Sorry we’re later than we – oh!’ She walked into the living room to find Alice fast asleep on the sofa, and immediately dropped her voice, as Sean followed her in. ‘Look, Sean, she’s sparko, bless her!’
‘Have you checked to make sure Larry’s not hiding under the coffee table?’ They both laughed softly. ‘You wake her up, darling, while I go and check on Frankie.’
Helen climbed the stairs, smiling to herself. She didn’t usually like to make love late at night – too tired to feel suitably receptive – but the prospect of a baby banished her tiredness. She went into the bathroom and chucked her unopened contraceptive pills straight into the swing bin. Then, even though she was dying for a wee, she came back out and crept down the hallway to Frankie’s bedroom. The cartoon dinosaurs around her magic lantern threw soft violet and peach shadows around the room as she pushed open the door, waiting to see the hump of her in her toddler bed – she always manoeuvred herself into a sort of prone kneeling position when she slept, as though praying to Mecca.
But there was no hump. At first, Helen thought she was just lying uncharacteristically flat under the duvet, which was pulled up, as though she was hiding. Fear flooded her entire body, as though dropped on her out of a bucket above her head. She ran over to the bed and whipped back the duvet.
Frankie was gone.
Chapter 2
Patrick – Day 1
He was hallucinating children. There, in the space between lamp-posts, a shadow thrown against a wall by the headlights of a passing car. Another at the entrance to an alleyway, submerging into the darkness like a night-swimmer going under, slipping from sight. A small figure in the rain, weaving between legs in a crowd. A white face against a smudged bus window. A city of little ghosts. Then he would blink and rub his eyes and the child would be gone.
‘You look shattered.’ His partner, DS Carmella Masiello, looked over at him. It was just past eleven P.M., and DI Patrick Lennon was giving Carmella a lift to the new-build apartment she shared with her other partner, Jenny. He wondered if she knew how much he envied her. His own home life couldn’t have been more different.
‘Your eyes – they look a little like a basset hound’s.’
‘Thanks, Carmella. You really know how to make a guy feel good about himself. I was told once that I have sleepy eyes, and that it’s sexy.’
He temporarily angled the rearview mirror towards himself so he could see his own eyes. He did look knackered. He hadn’t been taking care of himself, not the way Gill used to – she was always buying him eye serums and moisturisers that he felt embarrassed using. ‘But you don’t want to ruin your good looks,’ she would say, further embarrassing him. He was six foot two, with brown hair and matching eyes, and he’d been told he looked more like an alt-country singer than a cop. He didn’t believe it though – he didn’t think he was anything special and neither, apparent
ly, did his partner.
Carmella’s laughter drowned out a whole chorus and half a verse of the Cure song that was playing on the car stereo. ‘There’s a difference between sleepy and knackered,’ she said when she finally got hold of herself.
‘There’s also a big difference between having me as a partner and having Winkler.’
‘You wouldn’t!’
He smiled, then remembered what they’d been talking about, and why he was so tired, and the smile vanished into the shadows with all the ghosts.
Seven days ago on June 2nd, three-year-old Isabel Hartley, known to the public as Izzy since the tabloids had shortened her name for the sake of their headlines, had been taken from the living room of her family home in Richmond, where she was watching TV. Isabel’s dad Max had been out the front, waxing his beloved car. Then he got an important call from work on his mobile and went inside, leaving the front door open, and up the stairs to his office to dig out some papers. He was up there for twenty minutes. When he came back downstairs, Isabel was no longer in the living room. She wasn’t anywhere to be found.
Max Hartley was something in the City, loaded, the kind of person who, according to common perception, had little devil’s horns beneath his hair and a pointy tail concealed beneath his Hugo Boss suit. The mother, Fiona, was a former catalogue model who counter-balanced her husband’s profession by organizing charity fund-raisers. They lived in one of the best postcodes in the country, the kind of place where nothing bad happened. The Hartleys never thought that their child would be taken from their front room in the middle of the afternoon, certainly not on a street like the one they lived on.
Two days later, June 4th, another child had been abducted. Liam McConnell was two, a cheeky, chunky little boy with poor eyesight that forced him to wear glasses. His mum, Zoe, had left him in the car in Twickenham Sainsbury’s car park, strapped into his child seat, after realizing she’d forgotten to pick up her dry cleaning. She was only gone for two minutes, she insisted, though Patrick was sure it was more like five, maybe more. The woman in front of her in the queue had been arguing about a stain on her cashmere cardigan and Zoe, a freelance marketing consultant, described how she’d shifted impatiently from foot to foot, eager to get back to the car, on the verge of abandoning the dry cleaning when it was finally her turn.
She had locked the car, could clearly remember the thunk as she depressed the central locking. But when she got back to her white Audi A4, the back door was open and Liam was gone. An hour later, when a uniform had asked to see the car key she hadn’t been able to find it. Then she remembered, on her way back into Sainsbury’s, bumping into a man who had almost knocked her over. The car key had been in her jacket pocket. Patrick was certain that the man who had bumped into her had taken the key – unless Zoe was making the whole thing up, that she had forgotten to lock the car and had concocted the story to stop her husband, Keith, who ran his own recruitment company, blaming her.
Patrick had personally scoured the CCTV footage from the car park. One camera had caught the briefest glimpse of a man in a dark jacket carrying a child who looked like Liam, but it was impossible to see the man’s face or where he’d gone. Zoe insisted that the man who’d bumped her had been wearing a black jacket, but she had barely looked at his face, the photofit they’d put together from her patchy memory likely to be 90 per cent imagination. This hadn’t stopped the picture from being printed on the front of every newspaper in the country, sparking hundreds of calls from members of the public saying the man looked like their neighbour, their boss, their husband. Every single one of these unfortunate men had been eliminated from the investigation.
Patrick wouldn’t say the last week had been the hardest of his life – he’d had much darker weeks – but they had been long, frustrating and exhausting. Huge pictures of Isabel and Liam hung in the incident room. Their images were burnt into the retinas of every man and woman on the team. But so far, though Patrick would never admit this in public, they hadn’t got a bloody clue what had happened to the two kids or where they were.
It was as if they had evaporated.
A red light caught them and Patrick saw another phantom infant flash before his eyes, running between the stopped cars. His whole body thrummed with the need for sleep.
‘When you were younger,’ he said, ‘did you ever think you’d be spending your evenings locked in a room with a paedophile with a comb-over and halitosis?’
‘Oh god, don’t remind me. It’s in my nostrils. What causes that smell?’
‘Rotting gums. They should send him round schools as a warning to children about cleaning … Or maybe not – what the fuck am I saying?’
The interview had been a waste of time. Chris Davis was sixty now and had served his time for the abduction of a little girl thirty years before. But as he lived only a few streets away from Isabel Hartley and her family, he was on the list. But he hadn’t done it. He had an alibi for the disappearances of both Izzy and Liam.
It had been almost a week since Isabel had vanished, and five days since Liam. The chances of finding them diminished with every passing day – no, every hour.
‘What do you think they should do to people like Davis?’ Carmella asked. ‘Chemical castration? String ’em up? You should hear me ma, the things she says about child murderers. Like Baby P – she was on one of those Facebook groups calling for his stepdad to have his balls ripped off in front of a baying crowd, and salt rubbed into his bleeding, empty …’
He winced. ‘Carmella! Please!’
‘Sack.’ She grinned wickedly. ‘With respect, Sir, you’re a lightweight! All those muscles and tats, everyone thinks you’re such a hard man, don’t they? But they don’t know what I know – you’re a sensitive little flower at heart, aren’t you?’
He made a mock-scary face at her and she laughed, then looked serious. ‘But I want to know – what do you think?’
Lock them up in the dark forever. Put a bullet through their skulls. Make them pay for the pain they’ve caused. But he didn’t say that. He said, ‘I don’t care what happens to them afterwards. My job is to catch them.’
Carmella raised a dubious eyebrow. She was a pretty woman, thought Patrick. Actually, that wasn’t the word. ‘Pretty’ was a well-kept suburban garden. Carmella was more like a wild meadow into which someone had chucked random handfuls of seeds, with her corkscrewing auburn hair, dark Italian eyes and Dublin accent.
Patrick’s mobile rang.
‘Oh shit.’ All he wanted – all he wanted right now – was his bed. His body screamed at him to ignore the chiming phone.
‘Can you get that?’ he said, nodding at the dashboard where the phone vibrated on the plastic.
She studied the display. ‘It’s Mike.’
DS Mike Staunton was another member of the MIT and part of the team investigating the abductions. He was young, keen, good at his job, slightly irritating.
Carmella held the phone against his ear.
‘Mike.’
‘Sir. Where are you at the moment?’
‘Driving home. Why, what’s happened?’
‘I just got a call from the station – someone’s phoned in and reported seeing a man with a couple of little kids going into an abandoned building on the Kennedy Estate in Whitton. They reckon they can hear kids crying. It’s probably nothing but thought I’d better call you – want me to check it out?’
‘The Kennedy? We’re about five minutes from there. Leave it with us.’
Carmella sat up in her seat. ‘The Kennedy?’
‘Yeah. My favourite place to go just before midnight.’
He fiddled with the CD player, looking for something to buoy his spirits and wake him up. Inbetween Days came on and he turned it up.
Beside him, Carmella groaned. ‘Not this lot again. Haven’t you got anything current?’
He drummed the steering wheel and nodded his head. Passing a bus stop he saw a toddler dash in and out of sight. Another hallucination. ‘Carmella, I�
�ll make a Cure fan of you if it’s the last thing I do.’
The Kennedy Estate was one of those places where the police went in pairs, where, in his less politically correct moments, Patrick thought the Jeremy Kyle Show must hold their castings. A snakepit, where the most poisonous and dangerous members of society slithered, but also a sad place, where elderly residents barricaded themselves away, where children were born not with a silver spoon but its opposite: rusty, burnt, smack-stained. Hope didn’t come to die among these ugly high-rises and piss-stinking underpasses, because hope had never dared venture here.
‘JFK would be so proud they named this shithole after him,’ Carmella commented as they drew up outside a dark building on the edge of the estate.
They got out of the car and looked up at the building. Most of the windows were boarded up. Not a single light shone in the remaining flats. It was, it seemed, abandoned, ready for demolition, or perhaps the council would wait for nature to do its work, let it crumble, or leave it for future civilisations to marvel at. In the meantime, it provided a haven for squatters.
‘Is it always this quiet around here?’ Carmella asked.
Patrick looked about. ‘It does seem unusually tranquil.’
From within a nearby tower block, a dog howled and a man shouted for it to shut the fuck up.
Carmella said, ‘That’s the word I would have used. Tranquil. Reminds me a little of the place Jenny and I went on honeymoon.’ She sighed.
‘Most people who live here are too afraid to come out after dark.’ He lifted the boot and took out a sturdy torch. If he was an American cop he would have a gun, but he had no weapons with him at all. Still, the intention here was to investigate, that was all. The first sign of danger and he would call for back-up, although this wasn’t remotely reassuring – it only took a second for a finger to pull a trigger, or a hand to plunge a knife … ‘Stay close behind me.’